Sorted!

I got home tonight and my beautiful Sharkey, the Goldfish I have had for 9 years, is what I would call ‘critically’ ill.

Sharkey was bought for me when I lived with my friend in the 2nd year of university. He has moved house with me 4 times since, jumped out of the tank twice and got swiped by one of my cats before I got down to pick him up, and he survived the attack!

He has taken pride of place in his own tank away from the main 50 gallon aquarium because every friend we gave him (including George), he ate. He grew big and he does have a personality, if only a little one. He has a 6 month memory (not 3 seconds according to the myth). I am a cold and fresh water fish guru, with fish breeding and fry rearing ability don’t you know!!

Anyway, he recognises me, kisses my finger (OK yeah he thinks it’s food, but I like to think of it as kissing), he recognises the food pot and tells me when he wants feeding. That’s all I would expect.

Yes call me geek, I have already been called an anorak today (I won’t forget!), so really it doesn’t matter. I love my Sharkey and now I am observing the end of his eventful 9 year life. I have shed a few tears tonight as it is a bit of an end of an era for me and all that mean cold horrible husband of mine did, was laugh! He is a very valuable pet to me, and whilst I could go and get another one for £5, they won’t be Sharkey and I’m emotional, so I am incredibly sad about it. That’s all I have to say on the matter. [Sigh].

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I find more and more that I am ruled by time. Not just that actually, but that now it is starting to annoy me and my view on time is changing.

I am dictated to by technology almost every minute of my day. When I wake up, when I go to bed (i.e. nothing worth watching on TV!), my diary pop ups telling me where I should have been 10 minutes before, life or death tasks that must be completed by X day or the whole world will collapse without that sodding Excel report. I’ll give you a f-ing Excel report! Seriously, where has the human element of trust gone? No longer can you kindly walk to someone, meet them face to face (yeah, face to face, remember that?!), ask them nicely in a friendly tone and trust that support will be given within a timeframe, give or take a day or two. No, now you do it all by technology. Send an email of what is required and a diary invite for when delivery must be received. If you are really tight to time and fail to deliver by the outlook pop up, you could be lucky enough to receive a text message notifying you that your P45 will be posted and you have been fired! What has the world come to?!

Continuing with the subject of time, I just don’t feel I have any. When in reality, I probably have a bit more than most as I don’t have kids yet. I probably do it to myself, I like to plan, I like to have things organised and it’s not unusual for my husband and I to have the next couple of months of weekends and things to do sorted out. I don’t like not knowing, I hate surprises, I book my holidays a year in advance, I’m not particularly spontaneous and going off plan annoys me. Yet I can still moan about time I hear you say! Absolutely, there is a difference. My time (non at work time) is fine to be organised because that’s what I like doing and normally it is things I really want to do. I guess what I am really saying is that if I choose to do something exciting it’s alright, but if it is chosen for me and involves Microsoft, it’s taking my time away! Yeah OK, it’s called a career and that’s life, I get it.

Another thing with time, is that it’s really valuable and surprisingly, there is only so much of it. I like not to have many regrets about how it is spent, so watching a role play for an hour then having to hear the exact same thing played over a tape recorder can irritate me slightly. Especially when the vibrations coming from my Blackberry tell me I am missing other vitally important deadlines putting me just a little closer to that text message!

Well with the ticking time and the whole thirtyness thing, next year I will enter the dreaded decade, probably one of the scariest and busiest decades of my life and will have to say goodbye to my twenties. In the 20’s you can be forgiven more, ‘she’s still young’ ‘lots of development’ ‘she’ll learn’. In the 30’s all is not forgiven. At 20 you can turn up late for parties and look cool or at worst have eyes rolled at you then it’s immediately forgotten. At 30 if you turn up late to anything you just seem to be considered unreliable, boring, under the thumb or a mother! I hate being late for anything, now I am, and that’s all I need. Whilst there are many things I would like to be when turning 30, being 3 stone heavier and ante-nataled up is definitely not one of them. Time may be disappearing, but I don’t intend to waste it being the sensible Debbie I am always labelled. If only people got to know me and I would talk more!

In summary to my time dilemma, there are chances worth taking sometimes and I have had many reminders of this recently. Whilst the path of least resistance sounds great in principal and may have been one I adopted in my early 20’s, it’s not one I think I can get away with in my 30’s. Time to grow up unfortunately!

Well I guess we all need these. I’m not talking about the irritating loud music that bellows at 5.45am every morning bringing in swarms (or gaggle not sure of the correct term!) of cats onto our bed in excited anticipation of them being fed before we get ready for work. No, I’m talking about wake up calls in the context of work.

Every now again I need a bit of a kicking, OK, gentle prod. I’m only human and I’d like to think that I’m not the only one, but it is review time and I need it. I admit that sometimes my confidence does plummet, though I have no idea what the triggers are and on occasions I need reassurance. I do like to feel I’m loved sometimes, except when I’ve got a headache! But here I am, I’m getting what I need and will pick myself up. I have to stop stressing about my personal life and taking it to work. This in itself I can normally do and while I managed to park one of my personal concerns for another day, a reminder of times I would love to forget came back.

I went on a dignity at work course. Not because I have no dignity obviously… Daniel took that! I wanted a refresher. I went along looking forward to doing something different and hearing about some interesting cases and then something happened… we got onto bullying and sexual harassment and all these terrible memories from my last boss came flooding back. For every case example the trainer gave I had one just as bad. If only I had the benefit of HR or someone to turn to for support. What do you do when it was the MD doing all these things, the person you are meant to look up to, the person you want most to learn from and be like… what then? Why couldn’t I just have walked away sooner, why didn’t I have the courage to face up to it directly, why was I so withdrawn and quiet about it? How dare he take away my confidence and make me work in such a fearful environment. Who the hell did he think he was?

I’m not one to hold a grudge, actually that is a complete lie, I do hold grudges though really only two; one against this man and more importantly against myself for letting myself down. That’s right, I hold a grudge against myself. How ridiculous. I was far better than that, I was good at my job, I was better at his job, I was the shoulder for everyone else being shouted at and humiliated and I kept his business afloat while he was off cheating on his wife. The one thing he used to say that would make me cringe more than anything was the consideration that I was “his right hand.” Gross, there’s no f*cking way you’re having any hand was my usual thought! It wasn’t meant in that context…. but based on his behaviour anything he said usually had a dual meaning and meant jack shit.

To this day I still kick myself about not being stronger to deal with it sooner. I dealt with it in the end and left to join the company I love today. And when I hear the same things come up about what I need to improve I could just kick myself for letting my confidence slip and my voice disappear, I owe myself much more than to stagnate and not grow. It’s all my fault and I need to change, so I will, I promise.

So after a day of depressing reminders, and forgetting my parents anniversary (it’s been a really bad week!), I went to my best friends for dinner. She is so great, she always knows how to cheer me up and make me laugh. She knows everything about me it’s quite frightening how much we share, especially the love for Dolly Parton! There aren’t many people I can share that with that’s for sure!

A wonderful holiday over for another oooh…4 months until we go to Dubai! This was a fabulous holiday, in fact one of the best we have had. We were able to go away not having to worry about whether our jobs will still be there when we get back, whether my parents illnesses will be OK for 2 weeks and not suddenly get worse, whether the cats will survive the ordeal of us leaving them (obviously they are distraught) and whether our fish will cope with no human company. Alright so that is taking it too far, but you know what I mean. We had no real worries so could totally relax.

We arrived in Mexico to a really amazing 5 star hotel, complete luxury with the sound of silence from no screaming children; I was totally sold just walking into reception. Starting with our room it was a massive practically double king size bed that was so high I needed a ladder to get onto it and it was a 4 poster with beautiful netting, it was so pretty. Something quite special about 4 posters I find, not sure if it has anything to do with reminiscing about our engagement party and the hotel we stayed in that evening, but it was fab! Next to the bed was a massive Jacuzzi with a fridge full of alcohol. Perfect. Then we found out that the food was amazing posh nosh and as I was eating for three at least a month before we went on holiday it was quite satisfying to find a load of rather well fed fellows from across the pond also doing the same, so I didn’t feel out of place. Then I found out that they had a chocolate fountain in one of the restaurants for breakfast, so that was me sorted for the rest of the holiday! Quite disgusting, but I didn’t care.

It was so great to go away and just be with my husband. I know I see him all the time but we don’t spend enough quality time together and it makes me appreciate everything I really love him for that I often take for granted. The one thing that does drive me mad though are couples that go on holiday and are desperate to meet and become friends with anyone to the detriment of each other. Just watching them seek out poor un-expecting people to pounce on and spark conversation in the hope it is reciprocated. Naturally I wouldn’t be impolite…. and I did talk to the muppets that tried to latch onto us, but made it pretty clear I wanted them to f*ck off when the conversation was over. My holiday is my time with my husband, not with Waynes and Waynettas I will never see or speak to again. The thing that made me laugh most was when the desperate leachy couple were approached by another couple who were clearly far too intelligent and out of their league, but they didn’t know so started to ask them what sights they are seeing and whether they have been on any cultural trips or anything yet and the dimbo leaches turned around and said “well we’re going on a pub crawl on Wednesday night and then to Coco Bongos (a nightclub in Cancun) to get w*nkered.” I bowed my head in shame at the dimbo couple being British but it was absolutely hilarious. That stopped the conversation pretty swiftly as the other couple couldn’t swim off quick enough!

I had a little incident where I managed to get some dodgy bloke to give me a half naked massage while my husband went off to sort out our adventure trip to the jungle! I have no idea really what happened (it wasn’t my fault), I was quite happily lying on the bed in a beach hut thingy deeply into reading about a murder or something, when a guy came over, mumbled incoherently about the spa I think and the next thing I know he unclipped my top (clearly had a lot of practice!) and I was put into massage paralysis. No idea what happened, but I did think my God if my husband comes back now this is going to look really bad. Carried on anyway, then he put my bra back on and disappeared… weird. Still, I put it down to a Mexican experience.

I think my body is still detoxing from all the food and alcohol. I was fairly sensible to start with in keeping my diet relatively similar to home to avoid being ill, but my husband doesn’t listen to such advice so waded in there with ridiculous amounts of rich, spicy and acidic food and then complained of stomach ache for 3 days. Didn’t stop him drinking numerous cocktails throughout the entire day though. I must admit I did drink my own body weight in Baileys which might explain the load of weight I have put on. Nothing like being drunk by 9.30am in the pool. The best bit of this was when me and hubby were pissing about in the pool as normal whilst drinking a cocktail, I pulled his shorts down so he chased after me out of the pool then slipped, nose dived to the floor, spilt his drink, grazed his knees, hurt his hand and massively bruised his ego. Needless to say it absolutely made my day, so funny! He is still nursing his wounds.

As I was so nice to him during the whole holiday and he got more than enough of his share (so to speak!), I did manage to get him to willingly go to the best jewellers I have ever seen in my life. It is woman heaven, you have to have a security pass and member of staff with you at all times to go into this place. It is black marble everything, 3 floors, crystal chandeliers and you walk around like royalty with your glass of champagne and chaperone. The diamonds in there were stunning, it puts UK jewellers to shame that’s for sure. We weren’t expecting to see anything I liked being so fussy, but he had promised that this summer he would upgrade my engagement and wedding ring as we were poor Uni students when I got mine and 9 years later I damn well deserve some more!

Anyway looking around this jewellers I tried on the most stunning rings I have ever seen, my favourite (though far from the most expensive) was a mere USD 26k. Little out of our price range even after strong negotiation so I am saving this one for the next upgrade. I tried on about a 100 more and 3 hours later had seen one I loved. It was very expensive at half the price of my favourite one which again was a little out of the price range for what we thought would just be a day out to a mall and a Starbucks so weren’t prepared, but with a lot of negotiation, fluttering of eye lashes and it being tax free I got my 2 carats! It is such a beautiful ring, I love it. So much so I got my husband to go back a few days later and get me another one as the wedding ring – well we had to, you can’t get the same quality of diamond and white gold in this country with our tax and mark up...Well that was my excuse anyway, luckily he agreed and I walked away with diamond certificate in hand and a very happy lady! I am very lucky to have such a nice man be so tolerant of me. But like I said, I do deserve it…!

With all the excitement from the holiday what with food, drink, bed, Jacuzzi, swinging (not in the throw your keys in a circle way), gambling, diamond, cave swimming, zip lining and abseiling, it was time to go home. I was really gutted as I can’t express how much of a great holiday it was and how much we laughed. But all good things have to end, so here we are. It was quite nice to find an envelope hidden under a load of junk mail informing me of a large inheritance my parents have given me. I can’t touch it and I can’t spend it because it’s tied up, but bonus, I like that kind of mail!! Actually, I quite like being home, I missed everyone.